Mary Jemison (1743-1833) was born during a voyage from Ireland to the United States [sic]. Captured during the French and Indian War, she was adopted into the Seneca Nation and chose to remain a Seneca, marrying and raising a family in the Genesee Valley. Following the Revolutionary War, Mary was awarded a large reservation at the Gardeau Flats, in what is now the central part of Letchworth State Park, and lived there until 1831, when she moved to Buffalo Creek Reservation. She died in 1833 and was buried there, but in 1874 William Pryor Letchworth brought her remains back to the Genesee Valley after Mary Jemison's grandsons sought help preserving her grave when the Buffalo Creek Reservation was sold and the cemetery was left unprotected from vandals. Letchworth had her remains moved to the Council Grounds in a new casket inside a stone sarcophagus, installed her gravestone there in 1874, later relocated the gravestone around 1880, and placed a marble monument at her grave soon after her reburial. In 1910, that monument became the base for a seven-foot-high bronze statue of Mary Jemison, designed by Henry K. Bush-Brown, depicting her as a young woman carrying her first child, Thomas, on her journey between Ohio and the Genesee Valley.